Faith, Hope, and a Winchester
by MoKidd
Summary: Jess Harper was just another good old Georgia country boy. He liked his guns, he liked to hunt, fish, and spend time in the woods. He was just another backwoods hunter like any other. That is, until the day the world went to crap. Now he's come home to find his world destroyed and is now faced with survival in the zombie apocalypse. But if anyone can survive this new world, he can.
1. Chapter 1

**Faith, Hope, and a Winchester - Chapter One**

So far, it had been a pretty good haul. We'd been out for about two days, picking off every hog that we could find on the property and setting and baiting traps wherever we could find a good spot for one. All in all, we'd taken twenty-seven hogs off the old man's property in the week that we'd been on the hunt. Wild hog hunting can start getting pretty profitable with numbers like that. Sam, Randy, Al and I had a pretty good deal going with our little business for having just started in the last four months. Wild hogs had almost taken over southern Georgia in the last couple years and there were all kinds of hunting crews starting up, and with us being life-long woodsmen who had been hunting and fishing since we could hold a gun or a pole it was just sort of natural for us all to take out after them.

Old man Wallace had hired us to take out all the hogs we could find and was paying us pretty damn good for the service, and after that long of staying on his property and two days of camping and hunting we had just about cleared out every hog that wasn't stupid enough to head into deeper woods. They'd be back in a few weeks, if not longer, and we'd be back to mop 'em up all over again. No matter. Repeat business, as they say.

Me and Randy were coming back from dismantling the last of our traps, eight carcasses in the bed of my pickup along with the cattle-wire frames, when we pulled into the driveway of the Wallace farm. It was a pretty nice place, I have to say. There was a barn, a nice two-story house that had been built sometime in the old days, a corn tower where the old man stored most of his crop for market, and a pasture where he kept a bug dusty chestnut plow horse that his wife and daughters liked to keep as a hobby. A huge old poplar stood in the yard with an old metal swing that had once been red, the paint having long ago faded away and leaving just a couple of red streaks here and there. It was a place that I would have liked to have for my own. Maybe someday I would. Someday.

Right away I could tell that something wasn't right. The truck was in the drive and the tractor was in the barn, even though Wallace and his sons were usually out tilling the fields or working around the house at this hour of the morning, and the chickens were running loose from the coop and I could see no corn on the ground from their having been fed. Mrs. Wallace and her two daughters doted on those chickens. Al had made a joke about frying one up for dinner on Sunday and I half-expected Rosie Wallace to slap him silly. The old man sort of shrugged it off, but Will and Cory Wallace had to laugh. If Shane, their brother was here, he would have really gotten a kick out of this little hunt. I'd known Shane and our old buddy Rick Grimes since high school, but we hadn't talked for years. After graduation I went to the Parks Service as a forest ranger, while Shane and Rick joined the Sheriff's Department.

Al and Sam were still out collecting our other traps and wouldn't be here for another couple of hours a the least. The place was too quiet. I couldn't smell breakfast on the stove, even though it was just now 7:30 in the morning, there was no rustle of dishes in the kitchen, the guys weren't horsing around in the yard while they worked, and the horse was waiting in the field for his morning feed. The sun was full up and had been for all of an hour or more, so why hadn't the work been started around the house? Where was everybody?

I don't know what it was, but something made me feel uneasy. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and my finger unsnapped the holster on my hip. That holster was set for a cross draw and held my Ruger .44 magnum Blackhawk, it's bone grips standing out in the morning sun, and on my opposite hip was my new Remington Hog Hunter knife. I'd gotten just two weeks ago, but already I'd killed four hogs with it and that seven inch blade was sharp enough to shave with. The belt on which they hung was a cowboy-style leather cartridge belt that I'd made myself, and it held twelve rounds of .44s for my pistol and twenty for my Winchester .30-30 in the truck. I had a lot of guns back at the house, some said too many, but those two had always been my favorite for bustin' wild pork.

"Where the hell is everybody?", Randy said off to my right, putting my own thoughts into words through his thick Georgia accent.

"I don't know, but I don't like this."

Something caught my attention just around the corner of the house. It was a low sound, almost like a moan or a growl of some kind. It reminded me of a bear or a cougar in its den, but this sounded almost human. What kind of human would make a sound like that? There was a shambling sound, like someone stumbling around or dragging their feet on the ground. Someone was behind the house, just a few yards away, and from the sound of it that someone was in awful bad shape. Why else would they be shambling around and moaning like that? I wanted to go and see who it was, but something told me that it was a bad idea. I'd learned long ago to listen to my instincts and so I just stood stock-still and listened to the sound come closer.

He came slowly around the corner of the house, his left foot dragging behind him as if it was broken almost off. It was Will Wallace, the youngest of the Wallace boys and one of my oldest pals friends, but one look at him and I knew that something was very, very wrong. His eyes were sunken and pale, his skin was dirty and almost grayish, and on his neck I could see a wound that was covered with dried blood. There was blood on his shirt and his overalls, his clothes were filthy, and when I looked at his face it made my skin crawl. His mouth was set in an ugly snarl, teeth bared and his jaw moving side to side as he ground his teeth. There was something animal about him that I recognized. I had seen that look many times before, but never on a human being.

The look on his face and the way his features were set looked like those of a wild hog about to charge or a cougar that was sizing up his prey just before the pounce. His eyes were ravenous, deranged, hungry. He came slowly toward us in his crippled, shambling walk, and for the first time in a long time I felt real fear. This wasn't right. This wasn't Will.

"Will? Are you okay, man? What's with the leg?"

He didn't answer me. He just snarled again and started coming toward me a little faster.

"Will? Why don't you just slow down there and we'll see what's wrong with you."

Again he didn't answer me, but his pace picked up and he started to half walk, half run at me now. Randy was frozen in place a few feet behind me, his hands on the hood of my Chevy, and I knew that he was just as scared as I was. I felt a weight in my hand and suddenly realized that I had drawn my revolver and eared back the hammer. I'd used that gun for years and was intimately familiar with it, so the weight and the thought that it was there and ready for action was a comfort. Will kept coming at me, faster now and with his arms outstretched with grasping hands clawing at the air, and his eyes were suddenly feral and vicious. He meant to harm me, to kill me. Why?

"Will," I said as I raised the revolver and held it in both hands, "Will, you just stay back now. Stay back, Will! I ain't playing with you here!"

He kept coming, snarling and baring his teeth at me, now no more than eight feet from me. He was coming in fast, too damn fast to be on that game leg.

"Will, stop right there. Stop right there! Don't make me do this, Will! Will!"

He was on me then, only feet from me and his hands almost on my outstretched arms, and suddenly the big gun jumped violently in my hands. My ears rang from the thunderous report, I felt cold blood splatter on my face and my shirt, and I saw the back of Willy Wallace's head explode in a shower of blackish-red blood even as a .44-caliber hole formed between his eyes. He snapped backwards as if he'd been hit with a baseball bat and went down like a sack of potatoes. His cold eyes were still staring at the beautiful morning sky.

Even though I was looking down at him, I still couldn't believe what had just happened. My hand hurt from the massive recoil of the Blackhawk, my ears were ringing from the thunderous report, and there at my feet was the body of William Wallace. I had known him since he was just a kid back in middle school, ever since he had been the nerd of the town and me and his older brother were beating the hell out of anyone that made fun of him. Randy was still beside the truck, stupefied and frozen with fear, and I could hear him mumbling to himself as he looked at the same body at which I was looking.


	2. Chapter 2

I couldn't believe how long it was taking us. Normally the drive to where we were going would have taken about an hour or so, but four hours later we were no more than twenty miles down the highway. The roads were choked with cars, sometimes lined up for miles and just sitting there bumper to bumper. It felt like a graveyard driving through that. Everywhere I looked there were abandoned cars, people's things, clothes, tools, and children's clothes scattered all over the road, and in some places there were wrecks, overturned big rigs, cars, and two trucks. And of course, there were the walkers.

There weren't many of them here. Every now and then I'd see one milling around between the cars or locked inside them. They saw us coming through and all of them turned to look at us and started to snarl. Most of them were trapped or hindered by the cars, but a lot of them were freely roaming between the abandoned vehicles. I tried to pick my way through the huddled masses of cars, but there were places where they were just packed too tightly for my truck to get through. Both lanes of the road were clogged, but after a while I started to notice that all the traffic was in the same direction. There was almost no traffic coming towards town or towards the north in general, while almost every car was pointed down toward the south and toward Atlanta. It seemed that no one wanted to get into town or toward the north of the state but everyone wanted to get out and head south. I guess I can get that.

After a couple hours I got tired of weaving through the wrecks and pulled off the road and drove through the shoulder and through the shallow ditches to get around them. Even that didn't get us around all of them, for more than a few people had apparently had the same idea, but after a while the traffic jams and the wrecks began to thin out and we got into the open roads again. I had to wonder what happened to all the people that were here when it all went down. Had they all turned into these crazies? Were they all dead? Or had a few of them gotten away to wherever they were going?

None of us talked much as went down the old road. All of us were still reeling from what we had seen and what we had had to do. I tried to hide it, but I was rattled. My nerves were shaky and my hands were trembling as I worked the wheel, but I tightened my grip on the wheel to hide it from Bo and Craig. Bo sat in the bed with his AR still at the ready and Craig sat in the cab with me with a pistol in his hand. He had one of my .357's in his waistband and one of my 1911's in his hand, hammer cocked and with the safety on, and his bat in the seat next to him. I still my Ruger on and my Winchester was still loaded and in the seat beside me, and the and in the extended cab was the stack of other weapons that we'd taken from my house. The truck was loaded down with supplies, food, water, and ammunition, but I knew we would need more. All my life my dad had taught me to prepare for the worst and no one had to tell that what we had was little enough.

Three men can eat more than a body might think, even with careful rationing, and what we had would last only a week at the most. It was mostly canned goods, canned meat, fruit, and some preserves I made myself, along with the hog meat and a sacks of potatoes I had at the house. I'd been meaning to go to the store, but hadn't gotten around to it. If there had enough room I would have taken those other six hogs along, but with all the gear we had there was no way to bring them all. No matter. Where we were going there were plenty to hunt for meat.

It was almost another hour before we crossed into the national forest. Chattahoochee National Forest had always been one of my favorite places to hunt and camp. A man could get lost in those woods mighty easy and get back to nature when he wanted to, just lose himself in the peace of the woods and the sky and the animals. I was never so happy as I was when I was miles away from anyone else and just sitting by a creek listening to the water gurgle over the rocks or watching a sunrise or sunset from my own camp, cooking meat I'd just killed over a fire of hickory logs or pine knots. There were cabins out in those woods that had been there for as long as anyone could remember and where a man could live long and well if he knew how to do it. It was to one of those cabins that we went.

The back roads were mostly clear once we got into the thick woods, and a few miles in I turned off onto an old dirt road that one could easily miss unless he knew what he was looking for. I'd been down that road many times, but not for a few years now. That dirt road went for a mile or so, shaded the whole way by pines that grew on both sides of the road and so close that they almost scraped the sides of the truck, and after a while we came into a thick stand of oak and hickory. The cabin sat on a shelf of natural rock that came out of the side of a hill, a grey hulk that stood out against the forest and the floor of leaves.

It was an old place, built by my great-great-granddad and owned his family since the days when the Cherokee roamed free over this land. It was old and weather-beaten, its grey walls almost blending perfectly with the native stone, but it still stood as strong as the day it was built thanks to my dad and granddad. They'd been using it as a hunting cabin and sometimes as a vacation house for decades. It had one floor and was built out of old pine logs with a foundation of native stones that stood about four feet high at the bottom of the walls. Back in the old days that had been there to deflect bullets and arrows. The windows were small and had sliding shutters rather than glass to let in the cool wind in the summer and to keep out the cold in the winter. Two fireplaces heated the place.

I drove the truck up the old driveway, now covered with a thick layer of leaves and with most of the old gravel covering washed away by years of rain and runoff. It felt good to be back at this place. Somehow, it felt like coming home. I turned off the key and grabbed my Winchester as I slid out of the cab, ready for anything. I doubt that the crazies had made it out this far, but there was no way of knowing that for sure. Bo and Craig hopped out right behind me, guns up and ready, and I heard them fan out and look into the woods. I could see nothing in the woods beyond a few squirrels and a rabbit bounding between trees down in the holler, and there was no sound but the wind in the trees and the pecking of a woodpecker somewhere in the woods.

"What a dump," Craig said behind me.

"Don't diss it, kid. My great-great-granddaddy built this place back when Georgia was the frontier. My great-granddaddy made moonshine in the shed out back and my granddaddy ran it in his old Model T. That's how NASCAR got started, you know. This is the best place we could be right now, trust me on that."

"Still looks like a dump."

"Whatever, kid. Let's get the stuff inside."

I took out my key ring and found the key to cabin, and when I opened the door it felt old and empty. The air was stale from being shut in too long and there was a smell of dust and of old cloth and stale charcoal in the fireplace. There was wood stacked in the wood bin and a big pile against the south wall outside, both of which had started to crumble from age, and the dishes in the cupboard were dusty. There was an iron stove in the corner for cooking bread and such, also covered in dust, and on the east wall was a gun rack with three rifles and an old shotgun on it. They were all dusty and had that nice brown patina that comes with an aging firearm, but there wasn't a speck of rust on them and they were still as good as new. Two of the rifles were my great-granddad's '73 Winchesters, along with a Savage Model 99 that had been my grandpa's and a double-barreled 12-gauge that was just as old.

The cabin itself was small, about forty feet long by fifteen feet wide, all one room and with two sets of bunk beds in the back with the second fireplace in between them. The kitchen area was situated around the old stove, with rough cabinets built into the counter filled with cast-iron skillets and pots. A homemade table and chairs stood near the counter. Downstairs there was a basement carved out of the living rock that had once been a root cellar but was now a sort-of-equipment room. Dad had brought his reloading stuff out here years ago and it was still in good shape. There was powder, primers, lead blocks and several bullet moulds, and hundreds of rounds of brass down there. If we were careful and kept our brass, then we would have no problem with ammunition for a good long while. Besides the reloaders, there was a grindstone for sharpening knives and tools and a collection of picks, axes, shovels, hoes, and an adze.

Outside the cabin there was a garden that would need some tending, and just down the hill was a thick patch of wild blackberries. A spring ran out of the side of the hill fifty yards from the cabin and fed into a stream down in the holler, which was itself fed by rain and runoff from the hills and held water almost the year round.

Great-great-granddaddy Harper had been a canny man and had chosen his home with care, not only for food and water but for defense. The cabin sat on a natural shelf of rock that was devoid of undergrowth for more than a hundred yards in any direction, and the slope offered a clear field of fire through the small windows and down into the holler. There were deer trails and old foot paths within sight of the cabin that had once been Indian trails and could be covered easily from anywhere in the house. The road we'd driven in on was easily visible for several hundred yards as well. The woods around were covered with dry leaves and fallen twigs that would act as a sort of alarm and the birds and animals would alert us if anything bad came too close for comfort.

We packed the gear into the cabin and filled the pantries with the food we'd brought. I picked through the wood piles, careful to watch out for rattlers that might be hiding between the logs, and I brought a few logs inside and banked a fire in the fireplace. I added some kindling and dug out the flint and steel that I carried for starting campfires and struck a few sparks. The wood was old and half-rotted, but the flames caught and soon I had a fire going. I dug out the hog meat we'd brought and cleaned off one of the old frying pans at he pump outside, then went inside and started broiling pork steaks. Bo got out some canned corn and while the meat was cooking I washed out the coffeepot and threw in some grounds. In a little while we had us a meal and some hot coffee. It's strange how a nice hot cup of coffee can make everything feel a little better.

We ate in silence, all of us coming to terms with what had happened. There hadn't been time to think while on the run, on the road here, or while we were setting up the cabin. Now, though, when we were at relative peace, there was nothing but time. The birds were singing outside and the wind was whispering through the pines, the trunks swaying and groaning as they moved with the breeze, and somewhere in the woods that woodpecker continued his work. I cut another bite from my pork steak and looked outside. The sun was sinking into the western sky, lighting up the forest with a golden light that made this place seem like paradise. Reds, golds, oranges, and yellows filled the sky and reflected off the trees and fallen leaves and turned the sky to a fiery tapestry. Any other time I would have sworn I was looking at Heaven.

In the course of one day I had lost everything that I knew, everything that I held dear. My life, town, all the people I knew, they were all dead or gone running or hiding like we were. What was this? What had happened? Was this the End of Days like the Good Book said? Were the dead rising from the grave to walk with the living after the Final Judgment? That didn't matter. It didn't matter worth a damn. What was done was done and can't be undone. What mattered now was that I was alive. WE were alive. Alive, and, for the moment, secure and able to feed and defend ourselves. We had food, water, shelter, weapons, and ammunition that would last us a good long while. We could stay here, for a while at least, and we could survive.

"So," Craig said after the meal when we were all sitting at the table, "how long are we gonna stay here?"

"As long as it takes, kid. We have a chance here. We can stay for a good long while."

"I say we go down to Atlanta. There's people there and there's food and there's shelter."

"There's food and shelter here. Better stuff that you'll find in Atlanta, too."

"But there's people there!"

"Pipe down, son," Bo said, "that's exactly why I'm not taking you there. Have you ever seen a refugee camp? Well, I have. In Somalia I saw people come into those camps by the thousands every day, good and bad. Rapes, murders, thievery, beatings, they all happened every day. There wasn't enough food or blankets for everyone and before long folks were killing each other over a moldy crust of bread. You heard those military broadcasts. 'Come to the nearest CDC center for food and shelter. That's Army speak for, 'everybody come here so we can keep an eye on you.' If we go there, it'll be the same as it was over yonder."

"This isn't Somalia, dad. This is America. That stuff doesn't happen here."

"Oh, yeah? Then take a look outside and explain to me how those folks are up and walking when we saw them die. Explain to me why folks were blowing each other away inside of twelve hours after all this shit started over bags of canned goods or a pretty woman. Remember that kid from your high school that we saw get killed? Mr. Cartwright wanted his girlfriend and the kid said no, so Cartwright shot him dead and raped that poor girl in her own car. Remember who Mr. Cartwright was?"

"Stop it, dad!"

"Who was he?!"

"He was . . . he was my principal."

"That's right, son. It doesn't matter if it's here in the U-S-of-A or in some third-world shithole halfway around the globe, people are people. When things like this happen they either stand up and help or break down and lost their minds. Most folks don't have the stomach to stand up and face it, so they go crazy. It ain't just the Things we have to worry about out there. There's many a church-goin' pillar of the community that would blow out of your socks just to get those nice sneakers you got for your birthday."

"Shut up, dad!"

"Listen to him, kid," I said to him, "because he's right. I was never in the Army or anything, but I've been some places where folks treated each other harsh. You've lived an easy life so far and you haven't seen the dark side of people. It's bound to get ugly out there before all this is over. Those government boys just make things worse most of the time, but they might lick this thing yet. If we stay here, we can lay low, hunt and grow our food, and we can stay out of harm's way for a while."

"But what if those things come out here? What if they find us?"

"Then we'll do what has to be done. We're off the beaten path out here. Nine times out of ten a man couldn't find this place if he was lookin' for it even before all this hit. If they come out here we'll know it, and we're stocked up enough that we can deal with that when it comes."

He didn't like it, but slowly the idea was coming into his mind that his father and I were right. He was scared, he was alone, and he wanted to be around people and things that he was used to. He wanted to be behind solid walls with glass windows and a TV blaring in the corner to make him feel safe. He was young, I'd say about seventeen or so, and he hadn't known the trials that his father and I had known. I'd spent some time around hard men and had to deal with them a few times as a park ranger and a sometime bail bondsman in Colorado and Wyoming. I'd seen just how ugly people could be to each other, and that was before this plague hit.

The sun sank into the horizon and the woods soon became dark. The pines stood like the pillars of some grand cathedral, suddenly seeming so stoic and ominous now when before they were so beautiful and comforting. The forest creatures retreated into their nightly hideouts, the changing of the guard from the herbivores and gentle animals of the day to the predators and stalking things of the night. There were rattlers and coyotes and wild hogs out there, and there had been quite a few sightings of black cougars in recent years. The Fish and Wildlife Service had always said that there was no such thing as a black cougar or any cougars in the Georgia woods, but I could look them all in the eye and call them liars. I'd seen those black cougars with my own eyes and even had one walk within a few yards of my hunting blind once.

We sent up a schedule for a night watch. I would take the first shift from sundown to midnight, then Bo would relieve me from midnight to dawn. We would let Craig sleep for a while. He'd been through a lot and he was scared, and he needed his sleep. He went to bed on the bottom bunk nearest the fire, his baseball bat leaning on the wall beside him and one of my 1911s in his hand. He was scared, but he was learning.

The days passed by quickly. We cleared the garden of all the overgrowth and weeds, built up the rock fence again, and we dug fresh earth and compost from the hills and dead leaves. My granddad had planted potatoes and corn in there way back when, among other things, and they had since grown wild and thick. We left them be and I kept the seeds from the few tomatoes we had brought from my place for planting later. Bo and I worked outside while Craig tended to cabin, sweeping out the dust and cobwebs and cleaning out the gutter and chimneys. There were a few packrat nests in the house and we kept those for kindling. The woodpiles were mostly rotted toward the bottom and the middle, so I put an edge on the old axe downstairs and with the whetstone and we took turns cutting new wood. The woods were old and there was plenty of dead stuff, so for the moment there was no need to cut down any trees.

All of us went armed. I had told them that this place was remote and inaccessible, which it was, but we all knew that safety was a forgotten thing in this time. We all had hopes that things would go back to normal sometime but I think we all had the thought in our minds that we were in it for the long haul. I wore my gunbelt at all times, my Ruger fully loaded and that big hog knife finely honed, and I was never without my Winchester either slung over my shoulder or leaning on a tree or a rock or the wall of the cabin as I worked. Bo and Craig had taken to carrying my pistols in their leather holsters and Bo always had his AR with him. I saw that Craig seemed a little too comfortable with the guns, so I made up my mind to teach him how to shoot.

In recent years there had been a lot of talk of banning guns, of disarming the public "for their own safety", and I was glad that it hadn't happened. Times like this just showed how important a gun could be to a man and his family. To me a gun had always been like a saw or a knife or any other tool, to respected and used wisely and safely. These days, a gun was one of the most important tools a man could have. A gun kept a man alive, it put food on the table, and it kept the monsters at bay.

As expected, our food stuffs from the house didn't last that long. The hog meat was eaten in a couple days and the produce and fruit in less time than that. After a week in the cabin only the canned goods and most of a pound of coffee were left. No matter. By that time we had gotten the garden in good shape and were eating potatoes and corn, wild onions and turnips from the forest, and berries gathered from the nearby patch. I had set out snares for small game and we ate squirrels and rabbits from them, with occasionally a fox or a raccoon for variety. One time I caught a possum, but I let it go. I'd seen too much of those critters to ever want to eat one myself. The meat was good, but not good enough. After two weeks we were all gaunted and weak from the hard work and the poor food. Squirrels and rabbits and coons are alright in a pinch, but to stay strong a man needs fat meat. Every day while checking snares and getting water from the spring I'd seen the sign of deer, turkey, and hogs, and at the end of the second week I made up my mind to go out hunting.

Up till now, we hadn't dared leave the cabin or its immediate vicinity. There was work to be done and we were cautious of the birds and the sounds of the small creatures for any warning. I'd lived in the woods all my life and so I was already used to them, but Craig and Bo were city folk and they took some getting used to. Bo had been in the military and seen combat and so was more attuned to recognizing danger, but Craig had been sheltered and for the first few days would jump out of his skin at the slightest sound from the trees. He cringed when the coyotes howled in the distance of an evening and more than once I'd seen him reach for or pull the gun that he wore at the slightest sound. He would have to be taught, and when I asked Bo about it he agreed.

"I've been meaning to teach him," he said when I approached him, "he's never been the outdoorsy type. He's always in his room playing video games or chatting on his computer. He never wanted to go hunting with me and his brother, but now I guess he's got no choice."

"Where's his brother?"

"He's been in the Marines four years. The last I heard he was somewhere in the sandbox. I hope he's okay, somewhere away from all this, or that he's helping to put it down."

"You want to take him out and teach him?"

"Nah. You're better in the woods than I've ever been and I'd rather he learn from the best. I'll stay here and hold down the fort. You take him out and teach him well. He needs to learn how to take care of himself."

So I took him out into the woods and down to one of the deer trails below the cabin. I gave him the Winchester .22 and a handful of shells for the smaller stuff and I loaded up my .30-30 and filled the loops in my belt. We walked a few feet apart, me in the lead and Craig behind, both of us with guns in hand and ready. I talked to him in low tones and pointed out the things that he should know about the woods; the tracks of deer and hogs, the scratchings of turkeys, which plants were safe to eat or make medicines from, but he didn't seem to be paying much attention. I saw that right off and it bothered me. He would have to learn and time wasn't something that we had an abundance of.

"Hey," I stopped and shouted at him, almost letting him bump into me before he noticed that I had even stopped, "are you even listening to me?"

"Yeah, sure. Whatever."

"'Whatever' my ass, kid. These are things you'll have to know to survive out here. If you know how to track deer or to find the right plants to eat or find water it could meant the difference between life and death someday. This stuff could save your damn life."

"What does it matter? You and dad can do all this stuff."

"And what if we're not around anymore?"

That hit him at home. He hadn't thought about that before, but I think that it had come into his mind at some point. He had seen people die en masse and it had affected him. The thought that this father wouldn't always be there had to have come to mind. He tried to hold it back, but I could see that his emotions were welling up. He had tears forming in his eyes and his jaw quivered ever so slightly. I had struck a chord and I knew that I had overstepped. I let him have a moment. It was a lot to take in, what was happening now, and all of us had dealt with it in our own way. We had thrown ourselves into the work around the place and Bo had seen death before in the service so for him it was a little easier. But for him, a kid just coming into manhood, it had to be devastating.

I sort of walked a slow circle along the trail while he leaned against a tree and had a little cry. Folks like to say that real men don't cry. That's bullshit. Even the toughest men have times when they just have to break down and let it all out. Most of the time it's better just to sit down and ball it all out. Once the tears are dry and the moment has passed, there's nothing left to do but to man up and get on with it.

I looked around the woods and my eyes never stopped searching for sign. I had seen some tracks along the way and tried to explain them to Craig and now I found a patch of them in the dirt. That morning there had been heavy dew and part of the dirt had turned to mud and had preserved the tracks well. It was a sow and four or five piglets. Earlier I had seen the tracks of a big boar that was probably the head animal of this little group. I wanted to take Craig's mind off of his thoughts, so I took a chance.

"Come here and take a look at this."

He came over and dried his eyes, cradling his rifle and trying to keep an eye on the woods. He came over and I squatted on my heels near the tracks and when Craig went down to one knee I pointed them out.

"You know what these are?"

"Tracks."

"Tracks of what?"

"I don't know, pigs or something. Lots of pigs."

"Wild hogs. They'll tear you apart with their tusks if they can, but they're good eating and they're everywhere. See that track? That's the mama. You can tell by the size and the weight. See, sows are smaller that boars and they walk a certain way. Those little tracks are the piglets. A wild hog can have up to six of them to a litter and two litters to a year. See this set here? This piglet has a bad wing. He's got a bad gimp in his right foreleg. He won't last long."

"Why not?"

"He can't run. There's predators around that love to get a little piglet like him. He won't last very long. In his world death is a daily thing. An animal has to be strong and fast or else he won't live another day. He has to know his world and his enemies or else he dies. That's the way it is with us now. We have to know all that we can about as much as we can or else we won't last very long. There are predators around that can't wait to pick us off and the only thing that we can do is fight back and do what we can. Do you understand?"

"I think so."

"Things are gonna happen, Craig. You've seen it already. I don't want to think about it either, but you have to be ready if something happens to me or to your dad. We don't know how bad it is out there. This might be just a passing thing or it might be something worse. We haven't heard anything on the radio but those Atlanta broadcasts, so we just don't know.

"I know you don't like the woods. I know you're town-raised, right? Well, the woods aren't near as bad as you might think. A man can live easy out here if he knows what he's about. Look around you now," I swept my arm to indicate the forest, "there's food and shelter all around you if you just know where to look. Like these," I bent down and picked up an old pine cone, "these are all dried out now, but when they're fresh off the tree you can pick out the pine nuts and eat 'em. They're pretty good and good for ya, too. Ya can even eat the cone when it's young and soft. You cal peel the bark off a pine and eat the inner bark for protein and nutrients. If you find hickory nuts before the squirrels get to 'em then those are good eating, too. See that plant," I pointed to indicate a small yellow flower near an old oak, "that's yellow jasmine. You can use that to make a salve that'll cure a headache."

"I didn't know any of this stuff before."

"It's amazing what you can learn if you just take the time to look and to listen to the woods. I've been in 'em all my life, and I'm still learning."

We went on down the trail, following the tracks of the hogs. It was coming on to midday and they would be looking for a place to bed down right about now. Startling a big boar in his bed can be a tricky proposition, as he's apt to take objection and charge with those tusks of his, but we had it to do. From the tracks I guessed that he was a big one, probably tipping the scales at a hundred and fifty to maybe two hundred pounds. The sows with him were about half that size. I checked the chamber in my rifle and loosened the Ruger in its holster, then undid the safety snap on my knife sheath. Craig walked with his Savage up and ready.

We were maybe a half a mile from the cabin, as the crow flies, when I saw the fresh tracks. They were deep and clearly defined in a patch of soft ground, not more than a few minutes old. It was that big boar and he had gone off by himself again. The sows had gone on down the trail toward the river a few miles away, but that boar had left the trail just a few minutes ago and now he was somewhere in the brush. Now, why would he do that? Rooting for nuts and roots? Maybe. We were in the oaks now and there were acorns everywhere. The tracks seemed odd, though, and squatted down to study them a little more.

When a man tracks an animal or another man, he can't help but get to know them a little. Tracks tell a man a lot and they reveal certain habits or characteristics of whoever or whatever made them. That boar had been going at a good clip and occasionally stopping to root around, but in the last hundred yards or so he had stopped a couple times and just milled around. Here he seemed to have spun half around and looked over into the woods, or maybe back down the trail. Why would he do that? He wouldn't just stop and look around like that unless he saw or heard something that caught his attention. Smelled something? That must have been it. He must have winded us somewhere back along the line. Hogs have a nose several times better than a bloodhound's and they can smell food or a threat even from miles away and even smell food buried up to five feet underground.

Of a sudden, I felt odd. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and I could feel eyes on me from the brush. Something was back there, of that I had no doubt. I'd learned long ago to trust to my instincts and go with my feelings. Something wasn't right. The air felt tense, there was no sound from the trees, and for the first time I noticed that the birds had ceased to sing. Cicadas had been buzzing in the hickories, but now they were silent as well. Suddenly I knew what was happening and spun around on m knee with my rifle low and cocked. Craig saw the move and he lifted that old Savage just in time.

That boar was a big one, bigger than I had thought, and his tusks looked to be all of four inches long. He came out of the brush with his head low and let out an ear-splitting squeal as he came at us. I spun around just as he came crashing out at us and I fired from the hip, instantly working the lever and replacing the shell. My bullet hit him in the shoulder and glanced off his armor, for a hog's shoulder blade can be more than an inch thick with an inch and a half of hard cartilage over that that can stop almost any bullet aside from a heavy rifle load, and he kept on coming. Craig lifted that Savage and fired, blowing off the pig's front left knee. He stumbled and fell just a few feet from me and I dove to one side just as his black hulk slid over the fallen leaves in front of me. I rolled on my shoulder and rolled onto one knee, then lifted my Winchester to finish the pig off.

Before I could pull the trigger, though, that big hog forced himself up and started to come at me just as I was coming up. Another split second and he would be on me. I took a quick aim and squeezed the trigger of that .30-30 and I heard two rifles sound as one. The boar jerked stiff and let out another squeal, took one stumbling step forward on his good foreleg, then went down in a heap. He took a couple of deep, labored breaths and then he was dead. Craig held his rifle on the body while I went over to it carefully and gave it a nudge with the barrel of my Winchester. It was sure enough dead.

The two bullets had both found their mark, mine blasting through the hog's heart and Craig's punching through the neck and severing the spine just behind the skull. Either one would have done it. I thumbed fresh shells into my rifle and slung it over my shoulder, then flipped open my pocket knife and started to dress out the carcass. Craig stood off to the side and just looked down at the dead animal, his rifle still up and ready. I could see that he was in shock, and I couldn't help but smile a little.

"Is this your first?"

"Huh?"

"Your first kill? Is this your first?"

"Yeah . . . yeah, it is."

"Here, then," I draw my hog knife and plant the tip of the blade at the base of a tusk, then between the knife and sheer force I take it out of the hog's mouth, "take this. It's for good luck."

He doesn't quite know what to think of it, but he takes it anyway. It's a strange thing for a first-timer, but it's an old tradition that my dad passed down to me from his father and so on and so forth. I've still got the one from my first kill. I made it into an amulet and I've been wearing it ever since.

We dressed out the hog and skinned it, then took the best cuts of meat and wrapped it in the skin. We left the carcass for the coyotes and the other hogs, who would eat just about anything that came to hand, and we started back for the cabin. Bo was outside when we got there, axe in hand and chopping up some old deadfalls we'd dragged up from the holler. We hung the meat out to cure in the old springhouse a few yards from the cabin, taking some of it inside for supper. Bo had harvested some more of the wild potatoes from the garden and I'd found some more wild onions on the way back, so we ate well that night.

The next few days passed by slowly, but peacefully. We still saw no Walkers, as I'd taken to calling them, but I had no illusions as to whether they were out there or not. The work around the cabin kept us busy enough to have our minds occupied. All of us were getting tanned from the Georgia sun, and Craig was starting to build muscle from his turns at the axe and helping me drag more deadfalls from the holler and from the woods around us. We finished the hog meat and Craig and I went hunting again after a couple days, bringing home a deer and a couple squirrels. We foraged around for what we could find to augment our supplies and the garden, but there was little enough. We found bushels of acorns that could be boiled for coffee or meal and I knocked pine cones from the trees for the nuts.

Craig had changed. Where he had been nervous and jumpy before, now he was calm and more reserved. He wore his gun in a holster that was tied down to his thigh rather than stuck in his waistband as he had been, and he no longer jumped or drew at the slightest sound. Both Bo and I approved of the change. I think that hunt really changed his outlook on things, maybe taught him that things were different now and that he must work to survive. It wasn't all fun and games anymore. The world had changed, and we had to change with it. I had a feeling that he would do alright from now on.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

It was two weeks before we saw the first one in the woods. We all knew that it was inevitable. Those things were all over the cities and the small towns that we had seen while out on short-range supply runs in the truck. We'd started looking for other survivors, other people, and we had found no one. Every house we found was either deserted, burned, looted out, or had one or more of those things. We had started calling them walkers, which sounded about right to me, and we heard it coming before we ever saw it. Me and Bo were out on a hunt about a mile from the cabin when we heard that characteristic shambling walk sliding through the leaves, and then as it came closer we could hear the moan.

The moan was the weirdest part of it for me. I'd never heard anything like it before, and I never wanted to hear it again. It was a tortured sound, like a person with a raspy throat or someone with asthma or something was letting out a slow breath while in extreme pain. It made my skin crawl just to hear it. I heard the footsteps first and held up a hand to stop Bo behind me on the trail. He paused and held that old Savage rifle ready when he heard it a second later. At once we started toward the sound. It was coming from down in a holler not over a hundred yards from where we were, and we started along the ridge and worked our way down a narrow deer trail that led along the ridgeline and then dipped down into the holler. I saw him a second before Bo did, and the both of us felt our blood run cold when he turned to face us.

He was a cop. At least, he had been. His blue uniform was caked in old, dried blood, his pants were torn to shreds from walking through the thorns and brush, and his radio was hanging from his shoulder and almost dragging on the ground. There was a gun in his holster and I could see two magazines in pouches on his belt. His skin was pale, almost gray, and I could see patches of hair that had been torn off his scalp by strong hands. There was a wound on his neck and his shirt collar had been pulled away just enough so that I could see the gaping hole in the flesh and when we got closer I could even see the broken collarbone sticking out of the skin. He saw us a moment after we saw him and immediately I saw that same wild look in his eyes that I'd seen in the walker at the Walsh place.

"I got him," Bo said beside me. He lifted his rifle and I heard him click off the safety. It was an easy shot, no more than thirty yards and at a slight incline. The walker had been going down a creek bed at the bottom of the holler and was trying to come at us, but the bank was steep and rocky and he was blocked by a shelf of solid rock. The shot echoed through the trees and lost itself in the vastness of the forest, I saw the blood and brain matter fly from the walker's head, and the body fell slumped on its face in the dry creek bed. Bo replaced the shell and picked up the empty casing for later reloading and we made our way down to it.

The body looked almost fresh, probably not more than a week or so old. The skin was pale and cold to the touch and the caked blood on his uniform was crusty and old. I slipped the Glock from the holster and found it fully loaded, as were the two magazines in the carriers on his belt, and I took the belt for Craig. He needed the rig and it looked like it would be about his size. The gun and magazines had been in the weather and there were spots of rust on the metal, but a little work and some steel wool would take care of that. It was a .40-caliber, which I didn't have reloading supplies for, but it was another gun in our arsenal and a good leather rig. I went through his pockets while Bo watched the woods and found little else. Some gum, a pocket knife, a few dollars in his wallet with the picture of a pretty girl. Arnold Lesner was the name on his driver's license. Sergeant Arnold Lesner, Georgia State Highway Patrol, thirty-two years old, married with two kids, and a picture of what looked like a hobby farm somewhere in the country. Probably an alright guy in life. The rotting flesh in his teeth and the dried blood around his mouth proved what this, whatever it was, could do to a man.

A couple days later I saw two more while out on my daily patrols and I put them down in turn. The next day Craig spotted one by the spring and he put it down with the axe that he was packing along to cut some wood for the fire. It was a week before we saw the first ones at the cabin itself. We were all inside playing a game of cards when we heard the moans coming from the woods. We all knew what it meant and as one man we all came to our feet and grabbed for our guns. I was wearing my Ruger and Craig grabbed the dead cop's gunbelt and slung it about his hips while Bo grabbed the Savage from the gun rack. The Ruger came into my hand as I went out the door and the first thing I saw was a group of them shambling out of the trees.

There were four of them, three men and a woman, all in torn and ragged clothes and all with that cold, dead stare that had haunted my dreams since that first day. One of the men had one of his cheeks ripped away and the woman's lips were gnawed off so that the teeth showed plain as day. They all came out of the trees with that shambling, drunken walk that they all seemed to have and at the sight of us every one of them let out that deep, guttural growl and started toward us with their arms up and grasping for their prey. I looked into those eyes and I couldn't help but pity them. What had happened to them? What was it that had made them into these things? Were they conscious of it all? Did they know what they were doing? All those thoughts came into my head as I watched them come at us. They came closer and closer, those wild, black eyes staring back at me.

My gun bucked in my hand and I saw the first one's head jerk back, then the second man's head in turn explode in a spurt of dark blood as Craig's .45 put one in between it's eyes. Bo levered in a round and fired into the woman's head, blowing away the back of the skull and dropping her like a sack of potatoes. I eared back the hammer and took aim at the last one, but then an idea came into my head. He was coming closer to me, not more than six feet or so away, and I shifted my aim and blew out it's knees. He went down face-first in the dirt, but he didn't stop. He held out his arms and actually tried to pull himself toward me again.

"What the hell are you doing?", Bo said behind me.

"Playing a hunch."

"A hunch? Just put the guy down and get it over with."

"I don't know if it is a guy anymore."

"What?"

"You said these people are sick, that whatever it is makes them crazy. I don't think so. Look at him. He's not even in pain. I just blew out his knees and he doesn't even seem to notice. How can a person take that and keep on coming?"

I eared back the hammer and fired again, this time at the thing's chest. The bullet tore in right where the heart should be and a stream of dark blood come from the wound. The bullet went through and made the body jump a mite, but again it didn't seem to even notice. No scream, no involuntary jerk from the bullet, not even a hitch in his giddy-up as he snarled at me and tried to crawl forward. The bullet just passed through him and into the dirt just like it would one a tin can on a fence rail or a paper target at the gun range. It left a hole, but not much else. I holstered the Ruger and drew my big hog knife from the sheath, then got down astraddle of the walker and drove the eight-inch blade in to the hilt right through the back of the abdomen. Again there was no reaction. He tired to turn over and curled his arms around to get at me, his snarling face still as evil as ever, but there was no pain or reaction of any kind. I put my knees on his arms to pin them and cupped my hand on his forehead, careful to avoid the snapping teeth, and then drew the blade across his neck. That knife was sharp enough to split a hair and I often used it to shave these days and when I dragged the blade across the skin the throat opened wide and let loose a torrent that same dark, thick, coagulated blood.

"Stop it, Jess, for God's sake! Just put him down."

"This isn't a 'him' anymore, Bo. These people aren't sick. Remember what you told me about the cops? How they shot these things full of holes and they didn't even flinch? Look at this thing. I blew out his knees, shot him through the heart, stuck him in the gut, and his throat is cut from ear to ear. Nothing can live through that, but he's still kickin' and growlin'. Look at the blood. Look at it! You're an EMT, you said, so tell me what you see."

"Jess . . ."

"Tell me what you see, Bo."

"I see it too, dad," Craig said, "just say it. We all know it's true."

Bo took a deep breath and wiped the sweat from his face, then looked down at the dark blood spilling over the ground under the creature's throat. I was still holding its head up and it was still snapping its jaws.

"That blood can't be right. It's too thick, too viscous. There's no way it could run through the veins of a normal person. It looks coagulated, but that's impossible. There's just no way."

"Why? Why is that impossible?"

"Because blood doesn't do that unless the person is dead."

"I know. I've seen that in dead animals. The blood gets thick, like jelly, and then it dries up. As soon as the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing and the body starts to rot. Look at his eyes, and his skin. Remember the cop? He was the same way. They're rotting, they're cold, and they don't feel pain. They're not sick. They're dead."

I pushed the head down and held the knife back, then with a quick stab I put the tip of it into the thing's head right where the spine meets the brain. I felt the blade go in, gave it a slight twist, and instantly the body went limp and the snarling stopped. He was dead, alright, or at least as dead as one of them could be. I stuck the blade into the dirt, to cleanse it of blood, and after wiping the blade off on the dead walker's clothes I put it back in the sheath. I got up, stiff from the effort of holding down the thing's arms, and without a word I just took out my gun and took out the empty shells, then thumbed fresh ones into the cylinder.

Bo and Craig just stood there and looked down at the body. I knew they didn't like it. I hadn't wanted to believe it myself, but ever since that first time back at the Walsh place it had been in the back of my mind. Nothing could live through that kind of punishment. I'd heard a lot of stories about people jacked up on drugs who could absorb bullets like no one could believe and just keep on coming like it was nothing. A few of my buddies who had served overseas told me stories about soldiers who had emptied whole magazines into insurgents all pumped on local shit and with almost no effect until they shot 'em in the head. I knew that drugs and adrenaline could make a man do crazy things when it came to wounds, but this was different. Even when a man was drugged out of his mind, a clean shot or two to the heart would take him down most of the time. The head was the best place to shoot in any situation, but without the heart a body just couldn't function. A man couldn't live without the heart, so when a slug like a .45 Colt hollow-point hit him there then it just had to put him down. I loaded those shells myself and made them hot enough to stop a three-hundred-pound boar in it's tracks, so how a man could take one in the chest and keep going was beyond me. A man couldn't do it. A man never could, but these things weren't men. They were something else.

We drug the carcasses down into the holler ante and piled them on the burn pile and burned them. It had become a macabre chore, since we'd done likewise to the others. The black smoke rose into the canopy and dissipated when it hit the almost solid roof of leaves and branches. The birds were silent, the squirrels weren't stirring, and the forest was eerily quiet. It was like even the animals could sense that something was evilly wrong. None of us said a thing as we watched the bodies burn.

I knew that Bo was hard hit by what he had seen. All this time he had been laboring under the idea that this was a disease, something that could be cured and treated. I imagine that a lot of people thought that way. No disease could account for what we had seen and what had happened to these people, these things. It might be an illness of some kind, but it wasn't just some drug or a sickness that made people go mad. This was different. This was the wrath of God, the dead walking the earth to feed upon the living. I could no longer allow myself to pity the poor souls that were on the fire. They were dead and still somehow walking around, killing and devouring anyone that they found. They needed to be put down, all of them.

The chores were done with only half enthusiasm for the next couple of days. We cut wood, we worked the garden, we hunted in the woods, and we did what we needed to around the cabin, but all of us kept an eye on the woods and all of us went doubly armed. Before we had all carried our pistols or knives with us, but now none of us were far from a rifle and we all had our gunbelts on. I'd taken to carrying my rifle slung over my shoulder rather than propped against a tree or the cabin while I worked. It got in the way of using the pick and the axe at times, but it was better than getting caught without it if the need arose. Bo and Craig stayed close to the cabin most of the time and I limited my patrols and hunts to within half a mile.

The trails became even more bare and the game became sparse, and more and more often I began seeing the same pattern of tracks on the trails and in the woods. It was always that same shambling step, the dragging feet, the drunken gait. I knew instantly what left those tracks and from what I was seeing there were more of them coming through every day. I saw less and less sign of deer and turkey and hogs and every day more of the walkers' tracks. I carried my rifle always in hand and ready for use and I found myself checking the loads in my Ruger for reassurance. I saw none of them, but we all knew that they were out there. I shot a deer and dragged the carcass back to the cabin and was immediately greeted by two gun muzzles pointed out the windows. They were on guard and ready.

The deer lasted a week, but it was little enough. The squirrels and rabbits were learning to stay away from the cabin and the larger game was being scared away by the walkers, so we were mostly dependent on our garden and the dried meat we'd made over the past few weeks. I was ranging farther and farther afield with Craig or Bo with me, always leaving at least one man behind to watch the cabin and the supplies, but it was getting harder and harder to find food . Finally the day came when a big storm came out of the north and came roaring down on the forest.

We heard it coming before we saw the wall of dark clouds coming over the horizon. There were places where a man could see for miles on the heads of ridges and ravines where the trees were naturally cleared away. The wind blew cold and hard through the pines and the hickories and whistled like a banshee as it blew leaves and twigs against the walls of the cabin. As fast as we could we gathered up all the tools and anything that we didn't want to lose and brought it into the cabin, but the storm came in too fast for us to have time to throw a tarp over the garden. The rain fell in sheets and soon there were little rivulets running down the hillside along the trails. Rain beat against the walls of the cabin and we could look through the windows and saw waterfalls raining down from the roof.

The rain fell hard and the woods were covered in a haze of water that was occasionally lit up by the eerie flashes of lightning. Great bolts of it split the sky every few minutes and once one hit an old hickory tree not even a hundred yards from the cabin and set it ablaze. I'd seen plenty of lightning-blasted trees in my time but never had I seen it happen in person. The rain pelted the side of the building and the drum of it was constant, and after a half an hour or so we started to hear the hail. It was strange to have hail this time of year, but when I looked out the window I could see quarter-sized pellets of ice bouncing off the ground and the log walls and I could hear the dull thuds of it against the logs. I laid on my bunk and tried to ignore the pounding, and eventually I slept.

Morning finally dawned and when we went outside we found exactly what I expected. The trees were bare of almost all dead limbs, the shrubs and the saplings were beaten down from the large stones, and when we went to look at the garden we found that the corn and the tomatoes had been crushed down. The tomatoes were smashed and the corn stalks were destroyed. The potatoes were mostly salvageable, although the plants were mostly beaten down. Some of the corn was still usable and we shucked and preserved what we could, but the tomatoes were a total loss. The worst part of it was that the seeds had all been ruined. There was no chance that we could salvage anything but the potatoes, and those would take time to grow again.

We cleaned up what we could around the place. Most of the damage was cosmetic; a cracked window on the north side, some damaged shingles on the roof, and so on. The truck was covered in dents, but was otherwise undamaged. The garden was the only total loss. Days passed and we ate only the slightest of rations, gathered what was left of the wild herbs and plants that we could find, and Craig and I hunted almost every day. It was no use. The storm had scared away all the large game animals or forced them to hunker down somewhere in the deepest, darkest parts of the woods. We made due on rabbits and squirrels and the occasional raccoon. After a week we were all gaunted and restless.

"We have to start looking," Bo said while the three of us were sitting at the table over coffee, "we have to start looking for supplies in the towns and houses."

"Towns are too risky. We can't take the chance."

"It's either that or we leave, Jess. We can't stay here with no food."

"The game will come back and we can grow more potatoes."

"Not for another month or so. The game is gone and they won't be back for a while and we've picked all the wild plants. This is the problem with this kind of living. Eventually you pick out all the native stuff and run off or hunt out the game. We need an alternative form of supply."

"What about those things out there? If we go out there, they'll be all over us."

"They're all over us here. They've found us and more of them will be coming along as soon as they run out of food in the cities. Eventually they'll have to come into the woods and they'll be looking for fresh meat. They can eat anything, we can't."

I hated to admit it, but he was right. We needed to find a new source of supply and the towns and abandoned houses were the best bet. There were small towns nearby and a couple hours down the road there was Evanwood. It had stores, my gun store, hardware stores, and a dozen other outlets where we could gather supplies and ammunition, maybe even get some other guns. Bo still had his AR and I had twenty others like it in my shop, along with dozens of handguns, shotguns, and newer rifles than what we had here as well as several thousand rounds of ammunition of almost every caliber. Assuming it hadn't been looted or destroyed since the town fell, it would allow us to resupply and then some. There was food, water, everything we would ever need. Assuming, that is, that we could get past the Walkers.

We loaded up our guns and what little food and water we could get in the truck. I filled the loops in my gunbelt and loaded my rifle up, put an edge on my hog knife, and loaded up my revolvers. I slipped a second holster onto my gunbelt and carried another Ruger where the knife usually rode, sliding the knife behind me into the small of my back where I could still get to it if the need arose. Craig had his 1911 and the mag pouches in his gunbelt were full, his knife was on his hip, and he had his bat slung over his back in a makeshift sheath he'd made out of some of the buckskin we'd been using to make jackets and moccasins. He had my old Remington 870 and a bandoleer full of shells that I usually carried while bird or squirrel hunting. Bo had his AR across his back and the few empty magazines he had on him, with my other 1911 and the dead cop's Glock in holsters at his hips. We all piled into the truck, Craig in the back and Bo covering the road with my old Winchester in .45 LC, and then we left out of our forest sanctuary.

There were more wrecks on the road than there had been. Most of the abandoned cars were still there, but there seemed to be just a few more than there had been when we came in. We passed an old gas station that I remembered had been shut down for years, now evidently taken up as a camping spot for a couple dozen cars and probably twice that many people. Tarps and makeshift tents covered the spaces between cars and a few of the places where a shelter could be built and under the pavilion where the pumps were there was a homemade wooden sign that said "NO GAS". The whole place stank of death and when I took out my old binoculars and looked around the hulks, I could see at least one body with flies buzzing around it. We left the station behind and went on down the road.

There were farm houses along the side of the road and we stopped at a couple of them to look around, but we found little that was of value. The livestock had wandered away or been driven off, the tanks for the tractors had been cleaned out, and only one of the houses had a gun left in it. It was a single-shot 20-gauge and apparently the only live shell left had been used by the owner to blow his own head off. There were spent shells scattered over the floor and we found two dead Walkers outside the house and another inside the house. Tracks around the house showed that there had been at least thirty or forty more outside. We found some cans of beans and fruit, a good hunting knife, and a few pounds of coffee and potatoes.

Another farm house down the road was a little more interesting. The windows were boarded up and there was a ring of dead Walkers around the perimeter. When we checked out the inside of the house we found spent shell casings on the floor, an old Henry rifle that looked like a reproduction, and there were noises coming from a room off to one side of the main living room that sounded like a Walker. The room was locked and there was no need to open it up, so we left it be. As expected, the house was stripped bare. It looked like the Walkers had just left, and by the tracks I guessed that a smallish woman of about five and a half feet and a hundred and ten-ish pounds ran away just ahead of the Walkers.

A gas tank was on the hill near the barn, but it had somehow been blown up and had the blackened hulk of a pickup truck beside it. We looked over the house and found nothing that we could use besides a few tools that were too heavy to take along and a few bodies inside the house and around the windows where they had been put down.

We left farm country behind and picked our way through the jumble of cars, stopping several times to siphon gas from the hulks, until we finally came into the limits of Evanwood. It looked like hell. There were cars lined up across some of the streets and there were places where someone had apparently fortified themselves up to try and last out the outbreak, but there were bodies in the circles of car hulks and makeshift walls that spoke of tragedy. There were guns and spent ammunition everywhere, but again no useful weapons and no useable supplies.

We saw Walkers on every street, milling around alone or in small groups, and when we passed by they looked after us and growled and tried feebly to follow along behind the truck. We picked our way through the streets until we were close to the main drag and left the truck behind. I remembered only too well what it was like to see that horde of them in the street and that the sound of the truck had seemed to attract them. We left it in the bay of the old Speed Lube down the road from Main Street. Guns up and ready, we made our way through the side streets and alleys until we found Main and picked our way through the hulks and the ruined shops. We found my shop after about twenty minutes of hopping over ruined cars, avoiding booby traps, and dealing with the few Walkers that came across our path. I stuck one in the head and Craig hit one a couple times with his bat until its brains were dashed out.

I dug out my keys and opened the door to my shop, my Ruger cocked and ready in my right hand while my left eased the door open. Nothing. The room was dusty and smelled of the stale cleaner that I used on the counters, but other than that it was virtually untouched. The shelves were still stocked, none of the glass counters had been broken, all the guns were still in place, and the odds and ends that I had on the shelves were all still there.

We worked fast. Bo and I took down the best of the guns from the racks and loaded them while Craig stripped the ammo shelves of everything we could use. All of the .30-30, 5.56mm, .45 Long Colt, .45 ACP, .40 S&W, 12-gauge, .22 LR, we took it all. Bo loaded up all of his mags and we filled the mags that I had on the shelves, then we packed up all the pistols into the mil-spec packs and duffels that I carried in stock along with the ammo. There were some better reloading supplies as well and we took them too. We left the Armory with a hell of a haul and had the cab of the truck pretty well full by the time we left. We went down the street and took what we could from the stores, loading down the truck with dry goods and whatever food hadn't rotted or been taken.

All this time we had little trouble with the Walkers. We took out a few of them, but always there were just lone Walkers or small clumps of them. We saw nothing of the hordes that had been wandering the town before. The town seemed empty, deserted, dead. We had come here expecting to have to fight our way through the hordes of the walking dead, but instead we found a deserted ghost town. The Walkers had mostly cleared out of the town, heading out into the country looking for food. This place was too quiet, too pristine, too dead.

"I think we've got all we need."

"I don't know. Something feels off here, Bo. I don't like it."

"The biters have all gone. The place is just quiet, that's all. If we leave now, we can make it back to the cabin by nightfall. We've got enough food here to last us a month at the least, if we ration it right, and enough ammo to fight a war."

"Something just isn't right here."

"You're just jumpy. Come on, let's go."

I looked at the sun and saw that he was right. If we moved fast, we could make it back just before the sun went down. The truck was loaded down with supplies, we had ammunition, food, and water enough to last us a good long while, and the town looked like it would be safe to come back to if we needed more. From the look of it, everyone was either dead, gone, or was one of the Walkers. That was what seemed odd to me. Even if ninety percent of the people had been turned into those things, there should still be someone else around besides us. And the fact that the stores hadn't been looted and that my store, the most logical place where someone would go to get gear to survive something like this, hadn't been touched. All of my inventory was there and the store hadn't been broken into.

We all piled into the truck and started down the road, weaving between hulks and the few roadblocks that were still standing. The Walkers were starting to bunch up and there seemed to be more of them filtering in through the streets as we went. We passed the remains of Charlie, nothing more than a pile of bones and rotten flesh where the Walkers and the crows hadn't eaten what was left of him. The Walkers I had killed that day were still in the street, untouched by the scavengers. The bodies were still rotting, but it seemed that neither the crows or the other scavengers would touch them. Whatever this was, be it a virus or a disease or a plague or whatever it was, it seemed to me that nature knew better than to mess around with it.

I swerved to avoid a burned-out SUV that hadn't been there before and as I rounded it I got a shock. There, in the middle of the road, were four men. They were all dirty, unkempt, unshaven, and they all had a weapon in their hands. Two of them were holding AR's, another an old scoped deer rifle, and the last one had a shotgun in his hands and a big machete hanging from his belt. I could see pistols in two of the men's belts stuck behind the waistbands. Right away I got a bad feeling. These men hadn't been in the woods or hiding in some hovel or shacked up in an apartment somewhere. They were too well fed and they were in too good of shape. They stood in a line across the road and the man in the middle, a tall, muscular man with a graying shoulder-length hair with a mustache and beard, took a step forward and cradled that AR in his hand and held it with the stock against his hip and his finger on the trigger. These were the bad types. These were raiders, scavengers, murderers.

The big man with the beard held up a hand and I stopped the truck. My hand moved all on its own and slipped the thong off the hammer of my Ruger, then the other, and then I reached over and eared the hammer back on my rifle. Bo followed suit and flicked off the safety on his AR and I heard Craig unsnap the safety strap on his holster. I gave a nod to Bo and he returned it, and then with slow, careful movements I eased the door open and stepped out.

"Howdy," the leader said with a smile, "Looks like you've got quite a load there."

"True enough. We've been making due, living off the country."

"Must have been good country. Haven't seen ya'll around here before. You just passing through?"

"Maybe. We might head south, or west now that we're supplied. What about you?"

"Ah, we're just goin' around lookin' for what there is. Seen any biters?"

"A few. We've killed our share."

"That's good. So, what all have you got in that truck? Anything good?"

I was playing for time, and I had a feeling that he knew it. I could tell that he had done this before, probably more times than I would care to know about, and every man behind him had the look of amusement that I'd seen many times before. They were like lions toying with a gazelle, playing with their prey before the kill. I'd seen them all look at my guns when I came out of the truck and I hadn't missed the way that they all looked me over when I took a few steps toward them. They'd probably held up quite a few survivors since it all hit the fan, but they hadn't seen people like us. They'd seen the truck loaded down with supplies and might have even been watching us load up in town, and all they had seen was a boy, an old man, and a man in a wide-brimmed hat. They probably thought they were looking at easy pickings.

My hands hung at ease at my sides and within inches of my guns, but they already had their guns out and they were ready for trouble when it came. They were probably waiting to start the trouble themselves. It had been a long time since I'd practiced for the fast-draw competitions and the cowboy-action shoots, but I had always been quick with my hands and blessed with better than average coordination. I'd practiced for hours a day at one point and I knew what I could do with a good sixgun, and I could draw and fire accurately with both hands. This man was looking at me like a snake looks at a mouse, and I looked right back at him the way I had looked at a hundred poachers, grizzlies, and rough types in the mountains and the deep woods where anything could happen.

"Why don't we see what you've got there."

"Sorry, I don't let anyone I don't know touch my truck."

"Alright, then. The name's Joe. I think I know you, though. You're Jess Harper, the kid that owns Harper's Armory."

"I'm Jess."

"Good. Now we know each other. Now let's see what you've got in that truck, friend."

"Sorry, don't think so."

"Friend," he took a tentative step forward and dropped his rifle into his hands, ready for use, "my patience is wearin' thin. Now I know what you're thinking and I wouldn't do it if I were you. You try something or call to your friends back there and these boys will drop you a couple times over. Just give up your shit and nobody gets hurt."

"I doubt it."

"Well," he said with a sinister chuckle, "I guess you're smarter than you look. You seem like a man that can handle himself, too. I like those guns. A man that likes a good revolver is a man that I can respect. A man with a Glock or an M16 could've been a cop or a yoga instructor back before all this, but a man with those kinds of guns is a man who knows he's good. Six shots ain't an awful lot, so you gotta make 'em count. Can you make 'em count?"

"I hit what I aim at."

"Yeah," his lips curled up a little into the ugliest smile I'd ever seen, "I bet you do."

It all happened in a second. That smile tipped me off and I saw his hips turn ever so slightly and I saw him start to swing that rifle up. The others were ready for the move and the one with the shotgun started to bring his up, while the one with the deer rifle dropped to one knee. I wasn't worried, I wasn't nervous, I wasn't even scared. There had been too many times like this before, too many hours of practice, too many situations for me to do anything but react. My hands dropped to my holsters, I felt the hard, rough checkering of my gun grips, and a fraction of a second later I felt them both jump in my hands.


End file.
